casing for the board’s battery and the housing for the
motor. “I dealt with everything else including building the
electronics for the board and the wireless glove, and
soldering the wires together that connect the battery with
the motor controller and the controller with the motor. I
also handled the debugging,” says Andres.

To debug the electronics, Andres built a simple wired
controller using parts from the IEEE lab including
resistors, LEDs, and potentiometers in order to interface
with the motor. In one instance during debugging, the
wheel would spin unpredictably. Andres could not figure
out why. “I finally resorted to using an oscilloscope to try
and figure out what the issue was. It turned out that my
poor soldering work was the reason for the faulty
connection,” commented Andres.

After he re-soldered it, the board worked perfectly.
Other troubleshooting issues included screws that came
loose and wires that slid out of their ports due to the
bumpy terrain the Mountainboard traveled over. Andres
fixed those with hot glue.

The wireless glove control device presented its own
challenges. “I had an issue trying to utilize SparkFun’s flex
sensor because I couldn’t find a way to bend my fingers
with the sensors without them moving out of place with
respect to my fingers,” Andres continued. He solved that
one by attaching the sensor between the middle and ring
fingers on the glove to maintain access to it. This way, he
can hold and bend the tip of the flex sensor with the tips
of both fingers and not worry about anything moving or
blocking the sensor.

Getting the wireless transceivers to communicate
was another issue. When Andres soldered the project
together and saw that it was not functioning, he
wasn’t sure whether it was the code in the
microcontroller or that he had hit the delicate receiver at
some point with more than the 3.3V allowable and
damaged it. To troubleshoot, Andres went to a basic
control setup in which he programmed one microcontroller
to tell the other to blink an LED. It lit up, so the problem
was in the code. “It turned out to be a missing semicolon
that I thought the Arduino compiler would have caught,”
says Andres.

Once Andres fixed the code,
he integrated the glove with the
board. While he had issues
configuring the thresholds in the
code at first and had to analyze
the serial output and mess with
the code, he was finally able to
fine-tune the glove and get the
board’s behavior where he
wanted it.

The Arduino microcontroller
on the glove first checks to see
whether the deadman switch is
held on, which is an indicator
that the rider does want to go
the given speed. When the
deadman switch is not held, the
board does not speed up. The
microcontroller then looks at a
variable voltage coming from